Archive for March, 2011|Monthly archive page

The family of blood is chasing the Doctor – ordinarily they live only a few months but with the Doctor’s life they could live much longer. He ends up giving a pocket watch to Martha to guard . . . We next find the Doctor and Martha in Edwardian England. He is a professor at a school for boys and Martha is his maid. He has dreams about being a Time Lord, the Tardis, and everything else, but doesn’t seem to actually remember who he really is. Martha does remember and is busy keeping an eye on him. Meanwhile, the Doctor seems very happy being human, and is even falling in love with a nurse at the school, much to Martha’s anguish. All of what makes him a time lord is in the watch. People are disappearing. One of the school boys disappears – taken by the family of blood and used as a host. Another boy, a younger one who is being bullied a bit, talks with the Doctor. He touches the watch while the Doctor goes to get something and sees a lot – who the Doctor really is, his future in World War I, and more. He takes the watch. This attracts the attention of the family of blood. Another maid is taken and made a member of the family of blood too. They find the school and Martha, but Martha realizes who they are. She runs to find the Doctor, but he doesn’t have the watch and the family of blood find them and take the nurse and Martha as hostages . . .

The second episode is: Family of Blood.

The boy with the watch opens the watch briefly. This is all Martha needs to get free and hold the family of blood while everyone else gets out. Martha tries to find the watch. She is confronted by the nurse, but the nurse has seen enough to realize the Doctor is not who he seems. Meanwhile the family of blood go to the school after getting the Tardis. At first the students and teachers hold them off, but not for long. Fortunately the boy with the watch does manage to keep out of their hands. In the end, the family of blood kill the headmaster. Martha, the Doctor, and the nurse manage to escape and are found by the boy with the watch. However, the Doctor likes being human and doesn’t want to be a time lord any more. However, the family of blood is using their ship to attack the area. Using the watch, the Doctor and the nurse see what their life together could have been like. The Doctor goes aboard the ship belonging to the family of blood acting still human, but he really isn’t, and it was enough for him to basically set their ship to self destruct. Then the Doctor finds fitting punishments for each of the family of blood. The Doctor goes back to the nurse to tell her it is all over and to invite her to go with him. However, the Doctor as time lord is not who she loved so she refuses. Later, the moment the boy who held the watch saw during World War I happens. He recognizes it and is able to avoid being killed thanks to it. Years later he sees the Doctor and Martha briefly.

The third episode is: Blink.

A girl named Sally comes to an old house to do some photography. It has a number of striking features, including some statues of angels. The statues move . . . The next day she returns with a friend. The friends sees an angel and goes into the past. Sally gets a letter from her friend saying how she ended up maybe 100 years earlier but she had a good life. There are strange messages that Sally starts getting from the Doctor. Sally meets a detective, but he goes into the past too. He is still alive in the present day – barely. He ended up owning a DVD company and put the messages hidden in there at the request of the Doctor. She goes to the DVD store guy she met earlier and they reconstruct the whole message from the Doctor. It turns out that the Doctor and Martha are stuck in the time the detective went to. The weeping angels stole the key to the Tardis. Weeping angels are creatures that can send you back in time and can move incredibly fast, but they can’t actually move when you look at them. The message ends, and they realize it is because the angels are there. Sally and the DVD guy make it to the Tardis and get inside. The Doctor programed the Tardis to go back to where he was, leaving Sally and the DVD guy stranded. Fortunately, the angels looked at each other and froze each other. A year later, Sally and the DVD guy are an item, but Sally is still worrying about the Doctor. She has a file full of everything from her experience. She sees the Doctor and Martha before they are trapped in the past, and she gives them the file.

The first episode is “The Lazarus Experiment”. The Doctor drops Martha off back home. A call from her mother prompts them to turn on the TV to see Tish, Martha’s sister. She is with a Doctor Lazarus who says he will change what it means to be human. After realizing what that could mean, the Doctor decides to stick around. They go to a black tie affair where Doctor Lazarus, who is probably in his seventies or eighties, turns himself back to his prime. His wife and partner wants him to turn her young again too, but he kills her. He also starts acting weird. Turns out whatever Doctor Lazarus did causes him to be unstable and it has activated a part of his DNA that is supposed to be inactive. He lures Trish up to his office. Fortunately the Doctor and Martha get up there soon enough to save her. Martha and Tish get everyone else while the Doctor distracts Doctor Lazarus, then the Doctor and Martha take shelter in his machine. Doctor Lazarus turns it on, but the Doctor manages to deflect the affects, turning Doctor Lazarus back into a human. He appears dead, but escapes. Martha and Trish go with the Doctor to stop him. They find him in a cathedral. Martha and Trish distract Doctor Lazarus while the Doctor sets up the organ to complement his sonic screwdriver, causing Doctor Lazarus to fall to his death. Later the Doctor says Martha can come with him as more than just a passenger. As they leave, her mother leaves a message saying how Mr. Saxon told her how dangerous the Doctor is . . . And Mr. Saxton is the one who funded Doctor Lazarus’ project . . .

The next episode is “42”. In this episode, after the Doctor sets Martha’s phone for universal roaming, they get a distress signal. It is a spacecraft falling towards a sun. The Doctor and Martha get separated from the Tardis. The ship’s engines are dead. They have just forty-two minutes to get the ship started again. The Doctor works on repairing the engines while Martha helps get through thirty dead-locked doors to the bridge. One person on the ship has been infected and is acting strangely. He first attacks the doctor then others. To escape him Martha and the guy she is with go into an escape pod which the affected guy jettisons. Martha calls her mother but hangs up when she is asked about the Doctor. Who is with her mother? The Doctor manages to get the escape pod back but get infected himself. It is all he can do to control himself. The captain admits they drew fuel from the star not knowing it was sentient. He tells Martha to tell the crew to dump the engines. The captain apologizes to the infected man and dumps them out an airlock. The crew manage to get to the bridge just in time and they dump the fuel. The entity leaves the Doctor. After making sure the remaining crew will be okay, the Doctor gives Martha the key to the Tardis.

The first episode is “Daleks in Manhattan”. This time Martha and the Doctor go back to New York at the beginning of the Great Depression when the Empire State Building is being built. They come across a camp called Hooverville full of homeless people who have no where else to go. Some get jobs working on the Empire State Building. However not all is well, and not just economically. People are disappearing. When the Doctor investigate, he finds people pigs – yes, these pigs were once people and they can still walk upright, though sadly their minds are closer to that of a pig. They find one gal looking for a guy – and they find him. He was one of the lucky ones. He managed to escape before the changing process was complete. Actually he kidnaps Martha, which is a primary cause of the Doctor investigating further. Eventually we find the masterminds behind this are the four Darleks who were to think like feeling creatures for the others and who managed to escape both the Time War and the events of “Doomsday” at the end of series 2. They want to create a Dalek/human hybrid because the Darlek race can’t survive as it is now.

The second episode is “Evolution of the Daleks”. The Doctor and Martha escape with the girl and her boyfriend, but the Daleks attack Hooverville. The Doctor gives himself up to save them. The pig-human who is still mostly human follows. He learns from the new Dalek-human that the plan is to inject humans with Dalek DNA creating a new Dalek-human race. The technology of the 1930’s isn’t enough to accomplish this so the Daleks are going to use a solar flair for power and force the Doctor to finish adjusting the machine to do this. Meanwhile Martha goes with the girl to the tip of the Empire State Building, trying to figure out the Dalek’s plan as well. The Daleks turn on the Dalek-human as he is no longer Dalek enough. The pig-human helps the Doctor escape. Once at the top of the Empire State Building the Doctor goes to try and undo the mechanism that the Dalek set up there. He gets electrocuted. Fortunately, it takes more than that to kill a Time Lord. The others manage to hold off the Daleks. However, the Doctor wasn’t able to stop the power from being sent down to where most of the Daleks are. The Doctor finds out where they are. It is too late – there is now an army of humans with Dalek brains. Or is that the case? It turns out that because the Doctor was the one in contact with the machine at the time, giving them some Time Lord DNA – enough for them to resist. The Daleks kill them, but not before three of them are destroyed. The fourth escapes. The human-pig is doing poorly – they are only meant to last a few weeks. The Doctor is able to fix him enough that he will live, even if he has to keep his rather unusual face.

JMS wrote most of the episodes for Babylon 5, but he didn’t write them all. Here we have six scripts and one outline. Larry DiTillio was story editor for the show. He talks about how he met JMS and about writing the scripts “Born to the Purple” and “Deathwalker”. D.C. Fontana talks about writing “The War Prayer”. David Gerrold tells about writing “Believers” and about the outline for “Laser-Mirror-Starweb”, which was never produced but was turned into a comic. Marc Scott Zicree talks abut writing “Survivors”. Christy Marx talks about writing “Grail”, and includes some photos with the cast. It is interesting – in some cases JMS hardly touched the script. In others, he revised heavily. The reactions to this are varied. Usually the earlier script is included in this volume, making for an interesting read.

The first episode is “Smith and Jones”, which is our first introduction to Martha Jones, a medical student. Her family seems rather fractured, with Martha trying to hold them together. She bumps into the Doctor (she doesn’t know it is him) and he says, “See like this.” Later she runs into the Doctor in the hospital where she works (he uses the name John Smith), only he doesn’t remember seeing her earlier. The whole hospital is basically scooped up and taken to the moon by these rhino mercenaries. They have no interest in the humans, but they are searching for an escaped alien convict. Martha ends up helping the Doctor, who has a bit of a time trying to keep away from the mercenaries. Since he isn’t human, he would be a suspect. They find the hospital director dead, which confirms the Doctor’s suspicions. He kisses Martha, leaving some of his DNA on her to stall the mercenaries while he goes to find the convict. The convict is an alien that lives off blood and takes the traits of those whose blood she drinks. The drinks the Doctor’s blood, but this marks her as not human as he is not human. She is killed by the mercenaries but not before she sets a machine to destroy the hospital. Martha revives the Doctor who sets off the machine, but by then the oxygen there is very low. Fortunately, the mercenaries return the hospital to earth. After a somewhat disastrous birthday party with her family, Martha finds the Doctor waiting for her. He offers to take her on one trip in thanks for her help, mentioning Rose and saying he would rather as a rule travel alone now. Martha agrees.

The next episode is “The Shakespeare Code”. The Doctor decides to take Martha to visit Shakespeare, who is really quite clever himself and sees through much of the Doctor’s facade. He is currently working on Love’s Labor Found, the companion piece to Love’s Labor Lost. Note – in real life both plays are real, but while we have record of Love’s Labor Found, the actual text is missing. Anyway, little does the Doctor (or Shakespeare for that matter) know that there are three hags (apparently the inspiration for the three witches in Macbeth later) who are really aliens using Shakespeare and his current play to break out of their prison, at which time the whole earth will fade. The manager of the theater is killed by drowning even though he is nowhere near water, leaving the play free to be performed. The Doctor and Martha find the witches. They immobilize Martha by using her name, but since they don’t know the Doctor’s true name he is free. They use something very voodoo (how they killed the manager) and a piece of the Doctor’s hair to stab him. Fortunately, time lords are tougher than that. They get to the play and with Shakespeare’s help (he is a genius) use words to seal the witches again. Unfortunately, all copies of the play were lost in the fight. The Doctor strongly suggests to Shakespeare that he not rewrite Love’s Labor Found since words have power. And that is when Queen Elizabeth I comes in and at the sight of the Doctor orders his head. He wonders what he did to deserve this, though I think he is rather looking forward to finding out.

The third episode is “Gridlock”. This time the Doctor takes Martha to the future, New Earth. Only this time it looks a little grungy and very congested traffic wise. Mood altering drugs are very popular. People have lived twenty-years on the underground expressway lucky to move a few feet a day. Martha gets kidnapped by a young couple desperate to use the fast lane (requires three people in a vehicle). Meanwhile the Face of Boe knows the Doctor is there and he sends his helper, a cat person, out to find him. The Doctor meanwhile is frantically trying to reach Martha. Martha’s car reaches the fast lane, but then the car ahead of them is eaten by huge crab-like aliens. The Doctor is near when the cat person finds him and takes him to the Face of Boe. This is in the remains of the government on the surface. Turns out the drugs mutated and became an airborne virus that killed everyone within seconds. The Face of Boe has been keeping the survivors underground in never ending gridlock to protect them. However, the virus is gone now. Using the last of the power from the Face of Boe, the Doctor unseals the motorways and everyone (including Martha’s group) escapes to the surface. This kills the Face of Boe, but not before he tells the Doctor his message: “You are not alone.” The Doctor doesn’t believe this – he would know if any of his people survived. Martha , who had been frustrated about the Doctor’s reluctance to talk about himself or what happened to Rose finally opens up a bit, telling about the Time War and how he is the last of the time lords.